This month of red heart-covered cards, jewelry advertisements and overpriced dinner packages got me thinking about how love is represented in popular culture. Just looking at what we see on television alone, you might think that true love is relegated to the young, the dating or the newly married.

How often do we see examples of people who have been together a long time  – say 25 years or more –  who show signs that they are still noticeably in love?

I can think of a small handful examples from the television sitcom archives:

Morticia and Gomez Addams (The Addams Family).

Cliff and Clair Huxtable (The Cosby Show).

Eric and Annie Camden (Seventh Heaven).

These couples were gentle, at time romantic. They were respectful to one another and even the teasing was tender.

But it seems to me that there are more TV examples of sniping, battling, put-up-your-dukes older marriages.

Fred and Ethel Mertz (I Love Lucy).

Ralph and Alice Kramden (The Honeymooners).

George and Louise Jefferson (The Jeffersons).

Edith and Archie Bunker (All in the Family).

Frank and Estelle Constanza (Seinfeld).

The elder Barones (Everybody Loves Raymond).

Al and Peg Bundy (Married With Children).

These long-time marrieds do more putting down than putting up with.

Are TV portrayals of longtime love  few and far between because they aren’t funny or airbrushed enough for a sitcom, or is it that we have little faith in the lifespan of a marriage?

There is so much that we can learn from the longtime marrieds – the ones who have been through the ringer with one another. The ones who have suffered health challenges and financial ups and downs and lost loved ones. These are the people who can show us what real love looks like because they know it’s hard work. They also know that intimacy comes with an emotional cost, but that it is in and of itself worthwhile.

Marriage expert John Gottman, author of numerous books on long-term relationships, writes that happily married couples behave like good friends, which includes respect, affection and empathy. They recognize that conflict is inevitable, and that some problems never get solved or go away. But they don’t get gridlocked in their separate positions. Instead, they keep talking with each other, listen respectfully and they find compromises.

But somehow these characteristics pale in comparison to Sandra Day O’Connor’s story.

Did you hear her story? This former Supreme Court Justice retired from her post in 2005 to care for her husband who has Alzheimer’s disease. She was the first woman Supreme Court Justice and, like so many women, when it came down to family, she put them over her career.

But in the assisted living facility where her husband is cared for fulltime, John, who forgets about his relationship with his family members,  found companionship with a female resident. They have reportedly been seen holding hands even with wife Sandra present.

Heartbreaking for Sandra, right? But here’s what grabbed my attention. O’Connor has said that as challenging as this is for her, she’s just glad he has found some happiness.

Now that’s a real-life love story.

Where are the TV versions?

 

 “I suck,” said my teenage soccer player after a recent soccer game, even though her team won by five goals.

“No you don’t,” answered her former coach who was also her father. “You just didn’t show up today. You were a ghost out there.”

“Players have bad days,” she volleyed back, her voice starting to crack. “But I feel like I’m losing my skills.”

“You’ve got the skills, Jen,” my husband said, reassuringly. “It’s just that you didn’t tap into them today.”

It’s always been fascinating for me to listen in on the post-game conversations between my husband and youngest daughter. After I got over the fact that my opinion wasn’t valued (because, says Jenny, I’m not “into sports”), I’ve come to see these after-game talks as something she and her dad share together; something which is theirs alone. But also, these after-game analyses contain a good bit of wisdom about life.

A few for instances:

In the early days of her soccer career, Jenny felt that wins and losses rested on her shoulders alone. During those post-game chats, she and her dad talked about being part of a team. That no game was ever won by one member.

Later she discovered that in spite of her best efforts to set up a goal, her teammates will sometimes let her down and that she, too, might let her teammates down. But a player should take pride in the moves that make the difference.

Over the years, she and her dad have talked about everything from what to do about ball hogs, optimizing one’s strengths and that it’s not the number at the neck but the fit of the uniform that’s most important.

Now that she is in high school soccer, they’ve been talking about getting more aggressive. She’s up against tougher competition and she needs to take more chances and more risks.

My husband’s advice has moved into the mental game now. The conversation after her game went something like this:

“You need to show up, Jen. Not be afraid to go for it – to not be tentative,” my husband said. “You’ve got to make more contact with the ball, acting like it’s the last piece of pizza and you want it, bad!”

“I know, I know. I was having an off day. Can’t a player have an off day?”

“Sure,” said my husband, “but today was not about that. It’s about effort. Even if you don’t make the shot, it’s the fact that you hustle. If you are 100 percent there, it can make up for physical mistakes. Your head wasn’t in the game – you were distracted.”

“Yeah. I was. I want to do better next game,” she replied. When we returned home, Jenny headed for the backyard to work on her ball skills.

The playing fields were never really a place where I worked out life lessons. Nor were they a huge part of my older daughter’s life.

But I have found these field notes to be quite useful on my own playing field at work.

For example, the success of a work project isn’t mine alone to bear. With the publication work I do, there are many moving parts. I have to remind myself that it isn’t only the writing that makes a publication good but the editing, design and printing, too. The look and feel of the publication is about more than one contribution. And it doesn’t always turn out like I think it will.

I’ve also learned that there will always be people wanting to take credit for the good work that their colleagues did. It’s just the nature of politics in the workplace – human nature. The desire to be seen.

Perhaps most profoundly, I am seeing how much of real life is in the mental game. Once you develop your skills, it’s all about your attitude. Your approach and how you access these. What you bring with you to the field or your desk.

It won’t be entirely clear what lessons Jenny takes from the field to her life until she gets out into the world. I hope a few will stick to more than her cleats. At least one thing is certain: they weren’t lost on her mother.

This piece was originally published November 2007. 

 

 

When I caught sight of the newspaper ad for one of my favorite folk mandolin musicians scheduled to play with the classical bassist my husband David really likes at the pitch-perfect university auditorium near our home, I called for tickets right away. I nabbed them in spite of its not-so-great mid-week time slot.

It was just the outing we needed to break the monotony of the winter workweek routine. So when we took our seats in the upper balcony, I sat down in my seat with happy anticipation of several hours of beautiful musical escape.

Once the lights dimmed and the low buzz of voices quieted, the duo began to strum their stringed instruments.

A minute or two into the first piece, I first heard it: a rhythmic clicking. I looked immediately for a drummer lightly touching a wooden stick to a drum skin, but stage left and right showed no signs of a drummer.

The clicking continued without a break for some time until I glanced over at David who indicated that he was hearing it, too.

Where was it coming from? The well-crafted hall was designed for sound to bounce around, and that was exactly what it was doing. I craned my neck and squinted to the far back of the auditorium to see if a lighting system might be responsible. Nothing and nobody was back there. Maybe it was a heating issue — it was cold, after all, and furnaces across the Midwest were all on full blast.

I made a pathetic attempt to block the sound from my ears by pulling my coat collar up and slinking down a bit in my seat. After 10 minutes, I could stand it no longer. I whispered to David that I was going to get up and talk to an usher — that someone needed to do something. But he was one step ahead. The moment the next piece ended, he exited the aisle toward the usher, tapped her gently on the shoulder and pointed in my direction.

She nodded, looked my way, but quickly crinkled her brow. She couldn’t hear the sound from where she was standing, but headed out of the auditorium to talk to a building manager, or so I later learned. David took a seat at the end of the aisle, staking an easy getaway location if that’s ultimately what we needed to do.

Those minutes felt endless as I lost the ability to ignore the sound. I was getting angrier and started a rant in my head that went something like this: A rare night of music; we don’t do it often; just our luck that the night we choose to go, the most acoustically perfect venue in the area has a building malfunction and we are the only ones who seem to be hearing it.  If only it were rock and roll – I’d be dancing in my seat about now.

Finally, the usher returned and whispered something to David. He nodded and made his way back to our seats. When he sat down beside me, he leaned in and said, “There is an older fellow sitting in the row right behind us who is connected to a breathing device. We are hearing the sound of air being forced into his lungs.”

What that’s you say?

I didn’t have to twist my head back to look very far to see a man of about 75 sitting beside a boy of about 12 or 13 (his grandson?) with a tube attached to his nose and a tank beside him. They were there,  like we were, to enjoy an evening of luscious sounds.

After the show, David and I talked about how speedily we recovered from our private huff once we thought about how this man struggles for every breath and has every right to listen to this concert, too. I have to admit that I was still disappointed in the placement of our seats, but once I connected the sound to a person rather than a building, whatever was left of my own humanity clicked back into place.

How easy it is to jump head first into intolerance, personal comfort and entitlement. How hard it is to let them go. But once we do, then we might be able to sit back a little and enjoy the show.

Originally published by Adams Street Publishing, April 2007

 

Note: After 13 years of monthly column deadlines, I am taking some time off so that I can meet the demands of my teaching and tutoring responsibilities. For the time being, I’ll be posting previously published columns. The one that follows was published last September.

Of all the characters in the books I read to my children before bed when they were young, bears top the list. We must have at least 20 illustrated storybooks with the word “bear” in the title.

And none of them are grizzly.

The title character in “Little Bear” wants to bundle up in winter outerwear to play in the cold winter snow and discovers that his bear fur is good enough. In “Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear?” an insomniac bear eventually falls asleep to his father’s voice telling him a story. And in “When a Bear Bakes a Cake,” the bear throws the cake in the lake. These immense mammals are often depicted with human traits and foibles, except of course for their thick, fuzzy coats.

That’s just the books. I haven’t even mentioned the number of bears of the stuffed variety. (Note to parents of young children: Stuffed bears make excellent returns on their initial investment. You may be pleasantly surprised when your child insists on taking them with her to college.) They are the protectors of little sleepers, along with all of those pillows.

So when my daughters and I went to Colorado last summer to visit my sister and learned that bears were roaming her neighborhood, the danger didn’t register at first. I must have been doing a great job of staying in a vacation mindset, focused on the image of bears behind iron bars at the zoo.

Until our second day. Proof that bears were close was made clear by large leavings in the middle of the road. Far bigger than a dog’s or horse’s. Locals told us that you could always tell if it was bear poop because you could see bits of berries and other vegetation in it.

Sorry. Ew.

I couldn’t have felt more like a city girl during our time there. Bears are berry eaters? Don’t bears come after people?

Yes, I learned, but not to make appetizers out of them. Only because bears are smart and know that where there are humans, there is most likely food. And just a few months before they are entering winter hibernation, food is on their mind, 24/7.

During our time in Colorado, we never received consistent instructions for what to do if we got close to a bear. Some said stay still; others said run. Some said stay quiet, others said scream. We put it out of our minds – except for poop sightings.

Until our final day. As we were lounging by my sister’s pool — me, my sister’s husband and their 13-year-old son, my 15-year-old daughter and a neighbor family — a lumbering, black fuzzy blob came into view. It was a bear all right – we later judged him to be a teenager in bear years – and he couldn’t have been more than 8 feet from us. Blessedly, the pool was surrounded by an iron fence, but not a very high one. The bear lifted his front legs and glared at us. We looked back, silent. Everyone stopped talking (probably stopped breathing too), but, a moment later, my brother-in-law gathered his wits about him and held his cell phone up to take pictures. I think I gasped loudly. The bear was either frightened by the phone, or the sound of me gasping, or who knows what else, and he quickly galumphed away.

People say that being at close range with real danger is never what you think it will be. You can’t predict how you will react. You think you’ll scream or run madly. Yet we all stood there, silent and unmoving. Without zoo bars, that bear was far from a fuzzy line drawing from our storybooks. I could sense his power. He could put me in the hospital with one paw.

But he didn’t. (And I am so grateful.) But I’m left with the feeling that it was a near miss and that shouldn’t be ignored. To live in perpetual fear of danger certainly would put a crimp on your day and most likely, negatively impact your quality of life. But I think that eye-to-eye meeting with a member of the animal kingdom – especially in “civilization” – as well as other acts of nature (flooding and tornadoes come to mind), is a chance to remember that we aren’t the center of the universe. We are also not alone and we aren’t always in the control seat.

And that afterwards, it makes a great bedtime story.

END. 

It has been a delicious summer. Not only because of the unseasonable lack of humidity. Or that a certain teenager had a job as well as a drivers’ license. Or that her sister was working fulltime. Or even that I’m cooking fewer meals thanks to a local food co-op that provides healthy dinners at a very affordable price.

No, the summer was a standout from the summers since I’ve been a mother (see “Summer Mothers” at http://www.toledoparent.com/search.php?category=-1&author=barish&show_per_page=10&page=1at for my thoughts on last year’s version) because of a nine-by-twelve foot space that I called my own. I owe it to two small iron chairs, a table and a flattop roof.

This space extends from a second story bedroom in my house separated by a door inset with glass that, up until a few months ago, had been treated like a vertical bay window. When my daughters were younger I lived in fear that they would somehow unlatch it and make their way onto this-rooftop-without-a-railing and well, you can imagine everything frightening that I can imagine about that scenario.

So until last spring, this 9 x 12 square foot roof had been untouched and uninhabited like the surface of the moon pre-1969 — seen from afar, but whose surface was never stepped upon. When my oldest moved out of the bedroom, I moved my office in. Finally, at long last, a room of my own.

But like so much else about motherhood, my office became everyone else’s office. A source for paper, pens and books. Where everyone printed out school papers and business documents. And though it was mine, it didn’t really feel like mine.

That’s about when the rooftop became a huge distraction, around the time when the trees woke up and greened, the branches stretched over this patch of roof and gave it a decidedly tree house feeling, complete with foliage for privacy and a great view of at least five neighbors’ back yards.

My friend and across-the-street neighbor Sean, who overflows with good ideas (especially of the home and hearth variety), saw similar possibilities for the slightly larger rooftop space above her garage and moved some chairs, a table and numerous plants there. When she invited me to sit with her there last summer for tea and conversation, I knew that this was an idea whose time had come … for me.

But my towel and sand chair just didn’t do it. Nor did a lounge chair with two positions. (Too perilous.) I almost gave up until Sean gave me an In.

It came in the form of a Sunday newspaper ad from one of those oversize warehouse stores. Sean handed it to me, smiling. There it was: two green iron chairs with a lovely floral back design and matching table – about two sizes bigger than child’s furniture and a size smaller than traditional porch furniture for $49.99.

It would have all been too easy if I had been able to run to the warehouse store 10 minutes from my home and return with this little trio of heaven. Several phone calls and four hours of driving in a hard rainstorm was what I needed to pick up the pieces. And, sweet success: I was rewarded for my efforts with a $10 off coupon and a husband willing to screw the pieces together.

Once the iron pieces became chairs and the table had its legs, I placed them smack dab in the middle of my little rooftop and wow. Who knew how awesome three little properly positioned pieces of patio-esque furniture could be? For those of you reading this in print: please refer to the attached photo. Those of you reading this online, go to www.ellenblumbarish.com for visuals.

It has since become my place for morning coffee and paper. My grab-a-few-minutes-between-events space. My get-away-from-noisy-teenagers. Members of my family have actually lost my whereabouts, forgetting to look for me here because I’ve told them that no one, I mean no one, is allowed unless invited.

I think I get it now. I’m just like the kid who spends an awful lot of time building a tree house (or hovering over a parent who does) and then nailing a sign that reads: No Grownups Allowed. It doesn’t go away with age. It probably gets more potent. It must be the desire for a little bit of personal space – some real estate — to get away from it all for a little while and claim a piece of summer for myself.

Ellen Blum Barish is an award-winning syndicated columnist, mother of two daughters and author of “Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life,” available at www.adamsstreetpublishing.com. Copyright 2008. Ellen Blum Barish.